Sharing business blogging tips and social media marketing know-how with small business owners, coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs who want to maximise impact and minimise cost of their PR & marketing budgets. Plus coaching, tutoring and set-up services.

Tutorials

January 22, 2010

So 21 days into 2010 and already so much good stuff going on… On Wednesday night I joined the Inner Journey tribe for a Native American Indian New Year’s Fire Ceremony.
Led by Jules Steinson, our animal spirit guides for the evening (mine
was ‘the swan’) and The Great Spirit, we drummed and chanted and danced
our way through an ancient ritual, culminating in our calling out to
Great Spirit what was ‘to die’ and ‘be born’ in us. We sealed our
intentions by setting fire to pieces of paper on which we’d written
whatever words had come to us during the dance. The biggest gift of the
evening for me was a chant which went, “Ground my body, water my blood,
air my breath and fire my spirit.” Beautifully simple and totally
uplifting. Ho!

The Inner Journey tribe is a spiritual group which meets every Wednesday night here in Penarth. I would love to post a link to their website here, but they don’t have one!! I know! BUT…they
soon will, as Jules is one of the people who’ve been pestering me into
running a workshop to show therapists, healers, earth angels and
lightworkers how to simply and painlessly create an online presence, build your ‘tribe’ and ultimately increase your income
using the internet and social media – all without feeling like you are
selling or being pushy. I have finally set the date and booked the
venue and am just finalising the agenda. Once that’s done, I’ll pop a
page up here and invite you to book yourself on. There are only 10
spaces available so if you don’t want to miss out, subscribe to this blog feed to hear about it first. So the details so far are:

June 16, 2009

An email from a client asks, "One of my guest authors is saying that there is no box on her post for keywords. She was asking if she needed to pay as she's on some sort of trial with Typepad. Have you any idea what's happened as my other guest author doesn't seem to have had this problem."

As I explain in this video, it's nothing to do with paying and trials - it's all to do with the Compose Post view which that guest author sees and she can make the necessary changes herself really easily as shown here:

Here are 3 little videos of 5 mins each which will show you exactly how to do it using a Typepad 'Notes' type Typelist*. Eventually, Bebe will create pages to link the images to. In Video 3. I show her where she will need to place the page url for the new pages. Click on one of the images or links below to launch it in a new (much bigger) window:

Assuming this is all new to you, I'm inserting a Notepad doc at the end of this post which will give you the HTML code 'skeleton structure' for creating text links and image links anywhere on a blog or a website, whether in a post, a Typelist or a Wordpress text Widget. You may notice a couple of differences from the code I used in the videos eg. alt attribute in the anchor string. These aren't hugely important so I'm not going to say anymore on that right now. Simply click on the link to download it.

Key to remember...If you want to include an image, it must first be hosted somewhere. In Typepad, you can upload an image into the Files area. Go to Control Panel and then click on the Files tab.

November 21, 2008

Was doing a Typepad Coaching Call earlier today with client Bebe Jacobs of BeginAfresh.com. Something which came up which we didn't have time to go through on the call, was how to 'split up a post' so you end up with just 2 (say) paras on the front page of your blog, followed by a "Continue reading..." link. Bebe knew how to do this with the old Typepad Compose Editor, but the 'new generation' Compose Editor had her confused - and I know she's not alone. So... I thought I'd capture a quick 'over-the-shoulder' video showing exactly how to do it and share it here.

I captured this video using Jing, which I'm still getting to grips with, so the final screen view is LARGE! - too large to embed in this post. Instead, just follow this link:

January 27, 2008

Oh to be able to peek inside someone else's Typepad account and see all their lovely code! Yeah - I know - that sounds indecently nerdy doesn't it? But I'm sure you've been there - or somewhere close at least.

You know how it goes... you visit a blog, you see something on it that you fancy having on yours, but you're darned if you know how they did it or where they got it from.

November 30, 2007

I keep on reminding Claire that she should get into Stumbleupon as another extension of her social media networking strategy... and she keeps on telling me that she will once I explain to her how it all works. There's nothing like a challenge to get my creative juices flowing, so I decided to combine an illustration of three approaches to stumbling with my first attempt at creating a video tutorial to show as well as tell you how it works. (Note from Claire: Yeah, in fact, I did sign up for an account a while back, prompted by 2 fab clients - Emma Bird and Claire Chapman - who both 'friended' me or something, but even after joining, I found the whole thing a bit confusing. Having said that, seeing that traffic to this blog usually triples if a post is Stumbled is sufficient motivation to learn more! So, back to Joanna...)

Now when I first stumbled across StumbleUpon it was as a way of finding new sites. I think it must have been in a quiet period when I was looking for new material and discovered that you could jump to new sites in the blink of an eye just by hitting the "Stumble!" button over and over again. And yes some of the sites were relevant and interesting (you set it up by indicating what kind of material you're looking for) - but after a while you find yourself hitting the refresh button over and over with hardly a glance at the sites you're reading, and start to wonder if it isn't time to switch off your PC set and do something more interesting instead.

But that's only one dimension of stumbling. There are loads of other ways that you can use it to make connections, to learn from your readers, to extend your blogging network and develop your online brand.

August 21, 2007

Had an email from a client this morning asking about insertingGoogle AdSense into blog posts - as opposed to 'in the margins' as a Typelist. I've been meaning to start doing this myself so thought I'd knock up a quick'how to' video on the topic. As you will see when you watch, my first attempt fails - but I have a little 'hot tip' up my sleeve which cures the problem.

I'm actually in two minds about whether to post this one or not as (a) the video quality is not great - not sure why - I'm still getting to grips with Camtasia - think it might be too big too, and (b) I feel very exposed by it - you can hear me thinking and talking to myself like a nutcase. :o) It takes a while to load too, but I think it's worth it. As always, we're talking TypePad here (Get a 14 Day Free Trial!). If you are already blogging, you can get started right away. The entire video (including my mistakes) is about 11 minutes long, so you should be able to complete this exercise in a much shorter time.

Gosh - I'm always doing this... starting a post and forgetting about it. Wrote this a couple of weeks ago!

Came across a new Typepad Widget today. PopShops.com is described as an Affiliate Shop Builder. Here's the blurb on this affiliate program 'aggregator' from Typepad's Widget Gallery,

"Imagine being able to add virtually any product to your TypePad blog in seconds. Now imagine that you get to keep 100% of the commissions you earn. PopShops.com is the only service that lets you search, mix, and match from over 14,000,000 affiliate products from networks like CJ, LinkShare and ShareASale all in one place. Pick products relevant to your readers, customize, then pop them in with a single click."

I've yet to sign up and have a play, so I can't really share any meaningful opinion yet, but it certainly sounds interesting and, apparently, it's so easy that even a 3 year old can set up a shop...

PS. I still haven't signed up... if you have (or do), please come back here and let us know what you think of it by commenting on this post. Thank you! :o)

May 28, 2007

One of my very recent projects, is the wonderful Thinking Blossoms blog for Judy Barber around her passion for photographing flowers. Cleverly, she is using it to promote her business by posting beautiful shots around which she can tell a coaching story. Anyway...

Crucial to her blog model is the ability to take photos from her camera and get them onto the blog. One of the challenges she faced was that the size of the pictures straight from the camera was waaaaay to large to upload to a blog post. Apart from the filesize issue, most people's screen sizes would prevent them from seeing the entire picture if she simply uploads them as is. On top of that, some of the pictures were taken with the camera on its side, so images would also be on their side. Judy needed to find a way to resize, flip and rotate her images without buying or downloading any special software and/or learning what to do with it. She asked me to look into it and then prepare her some kind of step-by-step instructions.